A number of organisations in South and Central Asia have recognised the urgent need to include boys and men in efforts to combat gender-based violence in the region. Yet there have been few opportunities for them to come together to work collectively on this important issue. To begin this process, UNIFEM and Save the Children Sweden, organised a three-day workshop in 2004 on 'Strategies and Tools for Working with Men and Boys to end Violence against Girls, Boys, Women and other Men'.
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My thanks to Anxious Black Woman for reminding readers about two of many intersections of Black history, Nazi atrocity, and the matter of not forgetting genocide is not only in the past.
Her post made me think about the on-going ways in which genocide (which always includes gynocide) is invisibilised cross-culturally, across eras, and by global media.
This post is a partial response to finishing the book, Love and Pornography, by Victoria and Garry Prater.
Let's begin with one basic observations about how things work in dominant Western societies:
Misogyny is not only corporately manufactured, but is also promulgated, promoted, heralded, and honored as "sacred" in a society that continually finds new ways to violate and degrade women as a gendered class.
A relatively young white man who appreciates many of the postings on this blog asked me to define what I mean by "a white man".
I'll attempt to do so here.
There was another post made here a couple of weeks or so ago that a good friend noted was potentially transphobic, or, at least, not very welcoming of trans visitors to my blog. I agreed with her and pulled the post. I revised it so much it became something else. What follows is that something else. (I sometimes use the word "they" or "them" as synonymous with "she/he/neither" and "her/him/neither", respectively.)
What immediately follows is from the book Love and Pornography (2009). (See the previous post for more.)
Although we had learned to approach most things political with tentative enthusiasm and trust, it really never occurred to us that men could use feminism and their claimed repentance for being a past misogynist as just another way to exercise power over women and our movement. Because once you’ve confessed you have nothing left to hide? Once you’ve come clean, you are just that, right? Innocent and trustworthy? After you’ve aired your dirty laundry, your drawers are clean and no one can come back at you and say there’s more dirt or new dirt on you.
Male privilege is a complex, vast, endemic matter, a bit like air--hard to notice unless it hits you in the face. If you're a woman living in a home with a man, that happens literally with atrocious regularity. I say this with knowledge that in the U.S. it is now "Domestic Violence Awareness" month. (I think it should be called "Let's Do Something About the Terrible Fact that Men Beat the Shit Out of Women at Home" month, but that's a topic for another post.